Edit: Apple has posted an official response to the claims that they are spying on their customers.
Apple has responded and said they will now encrypt the data transmitted during the Gatekeeper ocsp check and give end users the option to opt out of it.
See post #47 of this thread for more on this. Take home point is that the Gatekeeper certificate checks on your apps will now not be any risk to your privacy while connected to the internet.
Original Post:
No need to be scared about Apple's data collection that happens without your consent. Before doing anything you should read about the
trustd process and what it does on your Mac. Here's the link:
So you found something called trustd running on your Mac, and are now wondering if it can be.
www.howtogeek.com
Then read this article:
https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/
If you decide you want to block this certificate checking for personal security and privacy reasons....
There's a patch you can use to stop this activity in macOS Mojave through Big Sur.
Open up Terminal and copy and paste the following:
echo "127.0.0.1 ocsp.apple.com isrg.trustid.ocsp.identrust.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
It's probably wise to revert to the default setting before installing a new piece of software and after updating any software. In the rare case that a developer id is stolen or compromised and used to create malware, you would be exposed. OCSP stands for
Online Certificate Status Protocol. It's the way Apple checks if the app was notarized by them. On the postive side, they gather the info to determine how many macOS users have malicious software running on their Macs.
To undo, run this terminal command:
sudo sed -i "" "/ocsp\.apple\.com/d" /etc/hosts
Of course you can always use the Malwarebytes for Mac program to check apps before you install them. Bitdefender from the MAS is another free option you can use to scan any software first.
To better understand what the echo command does see:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...omputer-isnt-yours.306141/page-4#post-2195375
For those still running High Sierra or older macOS versions you don't need to use the patch to stop this. It only started after macOS Mojave was released. Jeff Johnson had this to say back in December of 2018:
I also tested macOS 10.13.6 with yesterday's security update installed, and zero packets are sent on first launch of downloaded apps, so it's definitely a new behavior of 10.14 Mojave.
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